LONDON, August 19, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Mendeley (http://www.mendeley.com ), a  media technology startup billing itself as the world's largest research collaboration platform,  announced that Paul Brown will join the team as Chief Operating Officer, a newly created position, effective September 6, 2010. He comes to Mendeley from Spotify, a startup that is making waves in the digital music industry, where he most recently served as Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships. 

 "Mendeley is building a vital product that has a significant impact on the lives of researchers, academics and students - revolutionizing how they collaborate and discover academic content online," said Brown. "I want to help grow the business and take it to where we all believe it can go. Having seen what the team has achieved so far and what's in the pipeline, I am hugely excited about this opportunity."

Paul is a seasoned deal-maker, business strategist and negotiator. Having spent more than 14 years working in the music, media and technology industries, he has quickly risen to senior management positions at UBS Warburg (Director), Sony Music (VP, Futures Division) and Pandora (MD, International). Both at Spotify and Pandora, Paul played key roles in establishing new digital business models that changed how music is distributed and consumed.

At Mendeley, Paul will scale the firm's London-based operations and drive international strategic partnership development. Paul's experience and broad network will be particularly relevant in helping Mendeley's existing and potential partners fully realize and benefit from the value of its tools and services.

 "Mendeley is growing by leaps and bounds, and so are the opportunities for working with universities, academic publishers, enterprises and governments," said Victor Henning, CEO and co-founder of Mendeley. "There are many parallels between what the music industry has gone through in the past ten years and the challenges that academia and scientific publishing are facing. We are thrilled to benefit from Paul's insights and lessons learned as we expand our platform and reach new users and partners. "

 Mendeley says it is used by more than 450,000 academics and industry researchers. Mendeley's reference manager enables researchers to arrange collaborative projects, work and discuss in groups, as well as share data across Mendeley's web platform. Launched in London in December 2008, the company says it is already the world's largest research collaboration platform and is on track to become the world's largest research database with more than 30 million indexed documents. The company's investors include those who previously built Skype, Last.fm and Warner Music Group. 

SOURCE: Mendeley